[Haskell-cafe] Finally tagless and abstract relational Algebra

[Luke Palmer]

On Tue, Dec 29, 2009 at 6:36 AM, Kim-Ee Yeoh <a.biurvOir4 at asuhan.com> wrote:
> Conal gives a lot of useful advice on DSL design.
> One way to start is to articulate existing pain. Where and why is SQL
> painful?
> Another trick is to work backwards: What kind of code do you really want to
> write?

A bit of unsolicited opinion:

Be careful with the latter tactic.  It is a good way to get ideas
flowing, but to cling to it is to commit yourself to a possibly
inferior solution.  The code we "want" to write is that which matches
the way we think, and I suspect most people who have learned Haskell
(at least me) have experienced their way of thinking being inferior.
Haskell is more beautiful and powerful than the best language I could
have designed before I learned it.

My way is to think hard about what the best way to think about things
is.  FRP is a beautiful example: reasoning with functions of time.  If
there is not something immediately obvious, or the obvious thing is
too complicated, scour the brains of smart people and wikipedia for
mathematical abstractions which capture the same thing you are trying
to capture -- mathematicians spend a lot of time thinking about how to
think about things.

The best API design will come from inventing the perfect abstraction
-- if it has already been invented, chances are it has been written
approximately as well as it can be (modulo minor details).  The best
API will teach its users to think better -- but the designer must have
already retaught himself to have invented the API in the first place.


> Whether you employ GADTs, initial datatypes, finally-tagless codata, etc.
> isn't
> really relevant at this stage. Prematurely latching on to a particular tool
> gets
> everything treated like a nail, even when they're nowhere close.

Amen!

Luke